Breaking down barriers

No, the panoramic view of the San Francisco Bay Area, with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background, is no wallpaper photo. Hendrik Weber is currently at the University of California in Berkeley as a visiting academic when he switches on for the video interview. But it is not only the phenomenal view from his office window which has put a smile on his face: Weber, a mathematician, can look back on a successful year.

It began with the Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute awarding him the Clay Senior Scholarship and inviting him to spend four months in the USA. In May, there followed the good news that the national and regional state governments in Germany would be providing funding of around 40 million euros for the Cluster of Excellence Mathematics Münster for a further seven years. “This means that we can keep the positive dynamics of the first funding period going and can continue to raise the international visibility of Münster as a centre of research,” says a delighted Hendrik Weber, 44, who is involved in the Cluster as a project leader.

A lot of work was necessary before the champagne bottles could be opened. For three years the researchers at the Cluster met repeatedly to write the application for an extension of the funding. “Our aim,” says Weber, “was a new research programme that continued to break down the barriers between mathematical disciplines.” The reason for this was that, over the past few years, combining
concepts and techniques from a variety of fields to find new solutions had proved to be a very fruitful approach.

“The first drafts we produced for the application were pretty wild,” he recalls. “But we adopted a process of first putting all our ideas onto the table and then thinking, all together, about what the main lines were to be – and that was extremely valuable.” Gradually, a coherent whole was produced – coordinated by Cluster spokespersons Prof. Thomas Nikolaus and Prof. Mario Ohlberger – which everyone was able to support, displaying the necessary spark of enthusiasm to the reviewers. This enthusiasm and a spirit of optimism were what persuaded Weber to move to the University of Münster in 2022: since then he has held a so-called Bridging-the-Gaps Professorship of Stochastic Analysis: his research builds bridges between various fields – in his case, between probability theory and analysis. This branch of mathematics deals with functions and their properties and provides tools to precisely describe changes and connections, for example in the natural sciences.

While still at school in Leverkusen, Weber was fascinated by the mathematics behind chemistry and physics. He studied in Heidelberg, Paris and Bonn. After completing his PhD, he made a career in the UK – from postdoc at the University of Warwick to professor at the University of Bath.

The move to Münster was a good decision, he says. Münster, he adds, has outstanding conditions for pioneering research in mathematics – with the Cluster, the newly established Research Training Group in Stochastics, the Collaborative Research Centre in Geometry, and the future “Centre for Mathematics Münster”. And what is he looking forward to most in the next Cluster funding period? “Doing some really cool mathematics. We planned for so long what we wanted to do – now’s the time to find proofs for a few theorems!” 

Weber is involved in the new research programme as a “bridge builder” in various thematic fields. In one project he is working closely with Prof. Raimar Wulkenhaar, an expert on mathematical physics. The background to their work is that many models in physics are based on quantum field theory – for example the standard model of particle physics which describes how all elementary particles interact with one another. From a mathematical point of view, many questions have remained unanswered since the 1950s. “We have drawn up a joint approach for investigating one of the problems in this theory and, ideally, we would like to contribute to a rigorous mathematical basis,” Weber explains. To this end, they are combining different techniques of their specialist fields. “The mathematical level of difficulty of this project seems to be very good: we need to work hard, but we’re optimistic that we can achieve interesting results.”

Author: Victoria Liesche

This article is from the brochure "Twelve months, twelve people", published in March 2026.

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